


Sun Shining on Rain

by SkadizzleRoss



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Human, Gen, Secret Garden-ish AU Because Why Not
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:34:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27083470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkadizzleRoss/pseuds/SkadizzleRoss
Summary: (Secret Garden-ish AU.)Gamekeeper Hank Anderson discovers an unexpected hideaway on Lord Kamski's grounds.
Relationships: Connor & CyberLife Tower Connor | RK800-60, Connor & Upgraded Connor | RK900, CyberLife Tower Connor | RK800-60 & Upgraded Connor | RK900, Hank Anderson & Upgraded Connor | RK900, Original Chloe | RT600 & Upgraded Connor | RK900
Comments: 2
Kudos: 25





	Sun Shining on Rain

**Author's Note:**

> A little found fam feel-good story, featuring some delightful art by [Ditty!](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Triple_A/pseuds/ditty)
> 
> Set in the fens of England in the 1880s, when manors were Fancy and servants were Many.
> 
> The cast:  
> Lord Kamski - lord of the manor, with two kids: Elijah (age seventeen) and Chloe (age six)
> 
> Jeff Fowler - groundskeeper/head groom  
> Hank Anderson - gamekeeper  
> Quinn (Sixty) - coachman
> 
> Amanda Stern - housekeeper  
> Simon - Lord Kamski's valet  
> Daniel - Elijah's groomsman  
> Connor - footman  
> North - Chloe's governess
> 
> Liam (Nines) - resident gremlin (age five)

“Is the spring coming?” he said. “What is it like? You don’t see it in rooms if you are ill.”

“It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine, and things pushing up and working under the earth,” said Mary.  
— _The Secret Garden_ by Frances Hodgson Burnett

They promise him two things with this gamekeeper job: peace and quiet. A cramped cottage to himself, one he can barely turn around in without banging his elbow on something. A bunch of muck-choked fields to wander. 

His only mandatory interaction is with that old cuss Jeffrey Fowler, who’s just as disinterested in small talk as him. He’s fairly certain Lord Kamski’s hiring an overgrown mountain-man like himself as more of a conversation point than anything, but he doesn’t mind much. Happy to give the nobility a long harbinger’s stare from across the yard.

It’s an easy job, a _quiet_ job, and this place happens to as far from America as his weary legs and queasy sea-stomach can take him, so he figures it’ll suit him just fine. 

He should’ve known from the start, though. From the _dog_. A lanky wolfhound of indeterminate age and unknown name, lounging on the cottage floor, ratty tail whap-whapping against a dusty rug.

“Comes with the job,” Jeff says.

First of many, turns out.

The whole Arkay debacle starts with the tack room. And the dog, of course.

The tack room sits at the northern end of the stables, cluttered with boxes and harnesses and saddle racks. Dog’s never shown much interest in it before, but around mid-June, Hank keeps finding him there: snuffling around the piles of horse blankets and the tangle of traces waiting on Jeff to repair.

Hank calls him off, and the lanky thing follows at his usual amiable lope. But the next morning, he’s back there, poking around the doorway, ragged tail swinging around in that low-and-slow hopeful way.

It’s not until a week or two later that he notices the breadcrumbs.

Literal bread crumbs, lined up one by one on the cobblestones, leading the dog on a steady path from Hank’s little standalone cottage to... the tack room.

Empty as always.

Hank throws the door open onto the stables proper, but all he finds is the new groomsman, watering the horses. He considers asking if he’s got some kind of Hansel and Gretel thing going on with the damn dog, but the new kid’s giving him a long, cold stare that discourages conversation.

Hank passes him a sarcastic wave and goes on his way.

Keeps an eye out for breadcrumbs, though. As does Dog.

Next, there’s the hayloft. 

He’s avoiding the summer sun out in the feed barn, taking his dear sweet time with repairing a gate latch that’s rusted all to hell. That heat-haze quiet breaks apart with a series of scuffling, dragging thumps up in the hayloft overhead.

He calls out a warning, “Miss Chloe,” without much thought.

No answer, but the humid air hangs on bated breath. He can picture the little lady of the manor frozen between the hay bales, her very nice dress coated in a fine layer of barnyard dust.

Hank continues on in a conversational tone. “I know Jeff’s warned you about playing up there. Could be snakes.” 

He doesn’t know this for a fact - he’s not quite caught up on English wildlife. Still, he waits for the predictable scramble of spooked kid fleeing fanged nightmares, and hears... not a thing. More of that careful silence.

“Suit yourself,” he announces. After awhile, there’s a few mouse-sized scuffles, the thump of the hatch leading to the back ladder, and silence. A tactful retreat for the little Lady Kamski, or so he figures at the time.

Then there’s that groomsman. Quinn, he thinks. Or Connor. No, Connor’s the polite one - he’s got a job up in the big house, footman or something. (He’s not up to snuff on all this servant hierarchy nonsense, either.)

Either way, he sees _one_ of the Irish boys sneaking into the stables one morning well before dawn, still dressed in his casuals. Hank’s eyesight isn’t what it used to be, but he’s pretty sure the kid has a loaf of bread in hand.

Well, who’s he to judge, kid sneaking a little extra rations. Both of them are rail-thin. 

...and if he’s bribing Dog for some damn reason, well, so be it. Maybe he’ll start following those boys around, instead.

In the end, the mystery solves itself. Ambushes him, more like.

He’s down on the lowlands out past the last hedgerows, the grass gone tall and rangy. Dog bounces along a hundred feet ahead, head ticking towards the occasional promising rustle of a potential rabbit or pheasant or duck.

Dog completely misses the damn kid, bursting out of the grass and nearly sending Hank down on his ass. He reels back, heart jolting from his chest to the back of his throat in one great lurch of panic. With a choked noise, he teeters forward onto his walking stick.

The kid is nothing short of a gremlin: mud clinging to him from nose to toes, the only clean part of him the teeth flashing as he talks. And he is talking, a mile a minute, but Hank’s got no clue what he’s saying. One of those English-adjacent languages, vowels and consonants sliding together.

Hank finally realizes the kid’s holding something out: a snake. Dead, by the looks of it, belly-up and mouth thrown open wide.

The kid frowns at him, dirt flaking with the motion, and then brightens. “A snake! Isn’t it?”

Hank finally pegs the accent, the dark tousle of hair. His eyes are gray, not brown, but the rest of him is a perfectly miniaturized Irish groomsman. All he’s missing is a mistrustful scowl. (Or a polite house servant smile.)

“I looked everywhere,” the kid continues on. “I had to ask Quinn what a snake was, he said it was a lizard but with teeth and no legs and look, this one has no legs—” 

His English doesn’t flow quite so fast as what he’d been speaking before - Gaelic, probably. Hank’s finally able to fit in a question edgewise: “Who’re you?”

“Liam,” the kid replies, distractedly. “Look!” He pinches the snake between thumb and forefinger, flipping it onto its belly in his palm. The snake flips obstinately belly-up once more. This particular snake is bound and determined to stay dead.

“Well, lucky you. Probably ain’t venomous, with those kinds of theatrics.”

“What’s ‘venomous’?” 

“Makes you sick. It’s a very nice snake.”

“I’m going to show Quinn,” Liam announces proudly.

“Great idea. Let’s go show Quinn,” Hank says, and turns him towards the house with a hand on his shoulder.

There’s a lot of things clicking into place. Haylofts and tack rooms. (Horse blankets piled a bit higher than they should be, maybe.) Lord Kamski hired on two Irish brothers, last he checked, not three. Besides, this kid is a little young for employ: can’t be more than six, and skinny enough he’s surprised the morning breeze isn’t bowling him over.

Hank shouts, “Dog,” and the dog in question comes bounding back, pausing to take an inspecting circle around the kid. Satisfied, the wolfhound lopes back towards the distant spires of the Kamski estate.

“Your dog is named Dog?” Liam asks, falling into heel on his other side.

“He answers to it.” Hank glances down his nose at the kid, who’s carefully pocketing the snake away in his mud-caked cardigan. He asks, “You know who I am?”

“Your name is Hank,” Liam answers. “You live in the small house with moss on the roof. You walk around with a stick all day, and Quinn says you’re in charge of the birds and deer and things. Do you talk to them?”

“Sure, I talk to them,” he replies. “But they only talk back to Dog, here.”

The kid stares up at him with just as much awe as Hank anticipated, tugging on some old heartstrings. They don’t have much flex to them, these days. Something gristly that tears and burns with a low, dull ache.

He finds a smile hiding in the corner of his mouth, anyway.

Liam keeps up a steady patter of commentary as they walk, drifting seamlessly from Gaelic to English and back again. Hank mostly just nods along, which seems to satisfy the kid enough.

Liam falls quiet when he sees the stables, though, the snake apparently forgotten in favor of a more important directive. Likely the one where he’s not supposed to be out making friends with the grumpy old bastard of a gamekeeper. He goes pale, starts to slip around Hank’s back, but Hank plants a hand on the back of his neck and steers him towards the door. 

He finds Quinn in one of the stalls, sleeves rolled up and muck rake in hand. The draft horse waiting patiently out in the aisle snuffles at this curious procession: kid and man and Dog. Hank squares Liam up with the open stall door and says, “Think you misplaced something.”

Quinn turns sharply, ready to argue before he’s even seen what Hank’s talking about - and then he sees Liam and goes about the same shade of pale as his brother.

Quinn lets off a sharp round of Gaelic. Liam hunches his shoulders.

“Couple guesses,” Hank says. “Kid brother. Nowhere else to go. This is why you’ve been skulking around the tack room at odd hours.”

Quinn’s expression snaps shut, the cold anger Hank’s coming to realize is largely defensive. Hank continues on politely enough. “And our benevolent employer isn’t aware he’s hired on three Arkay brothers, is he?”

Quinn’s face grows stormier still, so Hank cuts him short before he can get the bilingual tongue-lashing of a lifetime. “Look, I’d say this ain’t my business, but it is now. I’m not gonna tell the boss, but best we talk it over, nonetheless. Come by my cottage tonight.”

That’s around the time the kid pulls the snake out of his pocket. The horse throws a fit, Quinn looks like he’s well on his way to joining the snake in dropping mock-dead on the spot, and he finally bursts into shouting: “Out, Liam, get that out, where in the bloody hell did you—”

The rest is, well, more Gaelic.

They show up at his door well past sundown: Connor in front, Hank’s mostly certain, looking polite and cautious and well-to-do. Quinn looking one misplaced word away from a fight, a protective hand on Liam’s shoulder. All of them are dressed in the clothes they’d likely arrived in, short of hem and worn thin.

Dressed to travel, Hank thinks.

Liam settles by the fire with the dog, drowsing with the late hour. They talk. Connor talks, mostly; the more diplomatic of the two, Quinn only cutting in for the occasional sharp interruption.

“Our parents are gone,” Connor says. “There isn’t much other place for him—”

“He stays with us,” Quinn interjects. “We’re all he has. If the lord doesn’t like that, we’ll go. All three of us.”

Connor says, “We’re hoping it won’t come to that.”

Hank asks, “What have you been feeding him?” The kid’s tiny, even for his age.

“What we can,” Connor says.

“What he isn’t feeding to my dog,” Hank corrects. Connor frowns, puzzled; Quinn shoots a glare at the sleeping kid draped across Dog’s shoulderblades.

“You actually been using the room they gave you up at the house?” Hank asks next. 

“We trade off,” Connor explains. “One of us stays the night with Liam.”

Hank sighs. “And what about winter? You can’t sleep in the damn tack room once the snows come.”

“We’ll manage,” Quinn says gruffly.

“To hell with that. He’ll sleep here. At least it's warm. And I take my share of rabbit and what have you, perk of the job. I’ll keep him fed without raising the cook’s eyebrows.”

Connor runs short on words for a moment, mouth gaping. “You needn’t—”

“No one from the big house’ll come looking around here, no one ever does. Now, I won’t tell Jeffrey, but I’d recommend you do. Better he hears this from you than have it sprung on him. He’s a good man, you can trust him, but he prefers honesty to surprises.”

The twins shift uncomfortably. The notion of trust is pretty far outside their wheelhouse, that much is clear. 

Another old heartstring, twanging away. Damned useless things.

“Tell him myself, if you want,” Hank says.

“No, we’ll speak with him,” Connor cuts in. “Thank you for the counsel.”

“Can’t promise it’s good advice, but it comes free,” Hank mutters. 

Suddenly his postage-stamp cottage has a pair of bed rolls cluttering up his floor, most nights. Liam curled up under some retired horse blankets, the protective line of one of the twins’ backs turned toward Hank’s little cot. More nights than not, Hank’s falling asleep to the low murmur of a bedtime story. There’s the occasional lullaby, too, some familiar, some not. 

Come morning, it’s just the kid, usually with the dog curled in a comma around him. There’s usually a piece of bread on the table, too. Fresh out of the oven. Boys must’ve worked something out with the cook.

Quinn keeps up the cold shoulder with him out in public, Connor only engaging in the usual polite smalltalk on the rare occasions he escapes the manor’s stifling halls.

But past sunset, here they are: sitting around his table, sharing the occasional glass of whiskey when Liam’s gone to sleep. They don’t talk much of pasts and futures, and that’s just fine with Hank. Much of the time they don’t talk at all, whichever twin of the evening falling asleep right where they’re sitting. 

That’s fine, too.

They fall into a routine: Hank wakes up, wakes Liam, gives him his bread and whatever’s leftover from the previous evening’s stew and makes sure he doesn’t feed too much of it to the dog. 

Hank picks up his stick and heads out on his rounds and the kid stays back in the cottage, sneaking out the back door once the yard is clear. 

Once the manor’s out of sight, Liam appears from the hedgerows like clockwork and falls into step behind him. 

Liam is a bottomless pit of inquiry. He lapses out of English, sounding out his thoughts in a more familiar language; but he’ll eventually come back to Hank with the next random question to wander into his head.

Things like, “Why do you carry a stick?” (“For walking. Or bears.”)

And, “Why do you sound like that?” (“Could ask the same of you, bug.”)

“I sound like this because I’m Irish.” (“Well, I’m American.”)

“What’s America like?” (“It’s very big.”) “Is it cold?” (“Sometimes.”) “Does it snow?” (“Some places.”)

Liam wants to know everything there is to know about the estate lands. What he can eat and what he can’t, how to trap rabbit and pheasant and deer and what not. He asks the name for every creepy-crawling thing he can catch in his grubby hands. When Hank gets tired of saying, “Not the slightest idea,” he starts making names up. Turns into a regular Charles Darwin. He, Hank Anderson, mountainman-turned-gamekeeper, identifies six dozen new species of weevil, all with varying numbers of legs.

The days Hank’s fixing to go to town, he finds his preferred horse is nearly always tacked up and waiting by the time he’s stepping out of the cottage. 

The occasional bottle of whiskey appears in his cupboard, some little bit of magic. Coffee, too: the _good_ coffee.

And then there’s the occasional interesting rock or flower or bug trapped in a jar on his kitchen table. A new species of three-spotted beetle weevil, waiting on a name.

The brothers say nothing of all these little things, of course. 

Stealing his solitude away, piece by piece.

He supposes it’s inevitable, Chloe and Liam.

The way Liam tells it, he was climbing through the barn loft, minding his own business as a trapper hunting the haybale wilds of northern Michigan, when she pounced on him out of nowhere: declared him dead. Slain by a tiger, it seems.

As far as Hank figures, kids of roughly the same size just have some kind of magnetic attraction. One day Liam’s his usual magpie shadow, chattering away; the next he’s up an alder tree with the lady of the manor climbing gamely after him, announcing it isn’t fair, he’s so _fast._

“Let you in on a secret,” Hank calls. “It’s the shoes.”

Chloe plants herself on a branch, staring with a frown at the galoshes her governess had jammed her into on her way out the door this morning.

Chloe’s out of the galoshes and shooting after Liam in stocking feet in no time, Liam hollering some sort of challenge after her. And that's that. They're inseparable, after.

The twins fret, of course. They both doubt a girl of seven can keep a secret as large as this, but what choice do they have?

Hank hasn’t confessed to the other strange occurrences surrounding their illicit tenant. A pair of gloves, scarves, a hat, appearing from the ether; some slightly-too-big shirts, too-long pants, and a proper-fitting pair of shoes. Quinn accuses Jeff and Hank of these, and neither Hank nor Liam offer any evidence to the contrary. 

(The shoes are, in fact, Jeff’s doing. The gloves and scarves are from North, Chloe’s governess; Chloe sneaks most of the clothes out of her older brother’s long outgrown things.)

Hank saw Miss Amanda Stern herself leave _something_ of a penny candy shape and persuasion on a windowsill just past the kitchen. She placed the little wax-paper bundle and walked away, serene as ever.

If he notices Liam licking clean an empty wrapper not too long after, well - there’s nothing this household loves more than a secret, turns out.

It isn't Chloe, in the end. Through winter and most of the next spring, she holds her tongue regarding the boy she plays with in the gardens. (Around the important ones, anyway; Elijah, her father, her grandmother.)

But the day does come when the secret ends. Hank returns from town at midday to find Liam in the cottage. Unusual. And he’s _quiet._ Curled up in the corner, face hidden behind his knees. More unusual still.

Hank asks what happened, gentle as he can. 

Liam’s first answer is in Gaelic. Long and rambling, his panicked gaze fixed on a speck of ash on the hearth. But eventually he comes back around to enough English for Hank to piece things together: the Lord Kamski’s mother was out on a walk in the gardens. Liam and Chloe were playing. Liam didn’t notice she was there, nearly bowled her over. He puts on a poor imitation of the old woman, here: “’Chloe, darling, who _is_ this?’”

Chloe lied as best she could, but the lady went inside to speak to Lord Kamski.

Hank does his best with the empty platitudes, tries to get the kid calm. He’s standing up to go find Quinn when he sees Simon striding across the gravel, heading their way.

Liam doesn’t run. He knows there’s little point, even if he takes a moment to work up enough courage to step out from behind Hank’s leg.

Hank can’t do much more than watch as Simon, dressed in all his resplendent valet garb, leads that skinny little kid off towards a manor that dwarfs him. 

Daniel’s the one to fetch Quinn from the stables. Hank watches the kid sprint across the yard, shirt soaked from a hasty wash in a horse trough. Then he wanders up to Jeff, sitting outside the tack room with some leatherworking tools in hand.

He settles down with him to wait.

They wile the time away by the stables, watching everything but the servants’ entrance, talking about anything but the Arkays. Certainly not gossiping like a couple of fishwives. That’d be unbecoming.

Watching everything but the brothers when they come out, not half an hour later. The twins crowd around Liam just outside the servants’ entrance, talking low, and Jeff and Hank certainly don’t listen as the kid fights to get a single question past his choked sobs: “Do I have to go, now?”

And things click a bit more for Hank. Liam’s thousand questions about surviving on the fen. A boy’s curiosity, but with an undercurrent of fear: fear that he’d be set loose, left to fend for himself.

Connor carefully lowers to a knee in the gravel, ignoring his fine footman’s clothes just this once. He pulls Liam close, rubbing circles into his back as he sobs. “No, Liam, you stay with us,” he murmurs. “Always.”

Lord Kamski's agreed to keep the brothers on, it turns out. Liam missed that part of the conversation, too overwrought under all those wellbred gazes to fully understand all that was said.

He gets the story a half dozen times, from a half dozen staff: this tiny, scruffy kid being presented in the receiving hall, Lord Kamski Senior, his mother and the lord’s eldest son Elijah watching on with various grades of curiosity and amusement. Connor nearly sprinting up the servants’ stairs before Amanda caught his shoulder and informed him he would go when summoned, and no sooner. 

Liam couldn’t manage much more than a whisper in answer to the lord’s questions, but he did answer, and he even held the lord’s gaze as he did. Wide-eyed and clearly terrified, but he carried a fair bit of his older brothers’ stubborn streaks.

Connor was summoned, eventually - him and Quinn both, who was still wet and dripping from his rather rushed clean-up. Between the three of them, they made a very interesting sight. 

Apparently Connor made quite the face when Lord Kamski asked Simon if he was aware of this, and Simon promptly answered, "Yes, m'lord."

A rare crack in Connor's flawless stoicism, which only widened when the lord turned to Amanda. "And you?" 

Amanda said, "Yes, of course, m'lord," without hesitation. She offered no further explanation; just a simple point of fact. Liam belonged, by some unspoken agreement amongst the staff.

Simon and Amanda’s testimony to the twins’ work ethic proved good enough to earn the lord's benevolence, albeit with a lofty warning that this would be the last secret to be kept from their employer. Connor still looked a fair bit of shell-shocked as he gently elbowed Quinn into a bow and led Liam out of the hall.

Out here in the sunshine of the yard, Quinn explains that Liam will be sleeping with them, now, up in the main house.

“Can Dog come?” Liam asks, between the last of his hiccuping.

“No, I’m afraid not. But if he gets lonely, I’m sure Hank would be agreeable to you staying the night, occasionally.” Connor glances up to Hank, seeking affirmation. 

Hank gives an affable shrug, but his pokerface is as poor as ever. Connor smiles, accepting this as agreement enough.

Hank packs away the bed rolls, puts up the spare blankets. He keeps them in reach, though. Just in case Dog gets lonely. 

When he walks out into the fen in the mornings, him and the dog are always listening for rustling in the reeds. Not rabbit or pheasant but kid.

And more often than not, he’s rewarded. Sometimes one set of shoes clatters up the path behind him, sometimes two. Chloe and Liam run circles around him as they pelt him with a hundred questions: has he seen a wolf? What are they like, are they big? As big as Dog? Has he been to a desert? Has he climbed a mountain? Has he seen a tiger?

And on, and on. No end in sight to Liam Arkay’s curiosity, and unfortunately it seems to be contagious.

It’s all a hell of a lot less solitude than he’d signed on for, but agreeable all the same.

The kid's putting on weight, now. All three of them are. Hank would swear he caught a smile on Quinn Arkay's face one fine summer evening, riding one of the gentler horses with Liam balanced on the saddle in front of him. He's even seen Connor take an early night, once or twice, usually to split a bottle of something expensive out back of the stables with North, Quinn, and Miss Chloe's new art tutor. Another American, name of Markus. 

And, well, he can't deny a smile of his own, seeing the brothers taking their occasional walk to town, Liam between them. 

Worst kept secret of Kamski Manor, that kid. 

But that's none of his business. 


End file.
